Right idea, wrong approach

Plan to trim students from community college system needs more finesse

Gov. Jerry Brown's attempt to move career students out of the community college system slammed into a skeptical state Legislature last week.

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Posted Apr. 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Posted Apr. 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM

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Gov. Jerry Brown's attempt to move career students out of the community college system slammed into a skeptical state Legislature last week.

Brown might have the right idea but his approach leaves a lot to be desired. Lawmakers, not to mention opponents of the whole idea, desire a lot more tweaking to any proposed change.

Brown wanted to cap at 90 units the number of life-time credits someone could earn at the state's 112 community colleges. After that, a student could take more classes but the price would quadruple from the in-state per unit rate of $46. The idea was to price a lot of hangers-on out of the system making room for students serious about going on to four year schools or seeking some sort of job training.

In recent years as the state's money woes deepened community colleges have seen their funding cut again and again. That has meant fewer classes available and more competition for those classes. There are slots for some 600,000 fewer students today than there were just a few years ago.

The thinking was that it's not fair to have some students take classes over and over sopping up space needed by a student trying to advance.

That's not an unreasonable concern. But solving it by a simple unit cap - 90 units being roughly the number needed for an associate's degree or for many certificate programs - isn't nuanced enough to deal with the population served by our community colleges.

What about mid-life students returning to school for training to advance their career or change careers (almost a third of the 25,000-plus students and San Joaquin Delta College are between 25 and 49 years old)? What about students who have double majors? Or - and this goes to the debate about the long-standing mission of California's community college system - what about the person who just wants to take a class for the joy of learning?

Clearly, operating community colleges is too expensive for students and taxpayers and too important as an economic sparkplug and a spawning ground for our four-year universities to allow professional students to gum things up.

But Brown's unit-cap is not a solution, certainly not a complete one. It lacks any appreciation for the student population our community colleges serve. Nor does it recognize the 2010 requirement lawmakers put on the system to give priority enrollment to students with a formal education plan, taken a diagnostic assessment and earned fewer than 100 units.

We can't run our community colleges like we did 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. But neither should we try to increase efficiency and access by using a meat axe to fix them.